Read it.

Unfortunately, the left side of the blogosphere is in fact a caste system*, and the higher castes do not exist to break their own scandals: they exist to ‘break’ the ’scandals’ that are given unto them by professional scandalmongers within the Democratic party.  Which is why Markos is distinctly uninterested in covering this story further, to the point of not even bothering to update the original post (as of 2:30 PM EST, Thursday 05/06/10) with the CoC’s denial: it doesn’t fit the narrative, and Establishment Democrats don’t want this allegation explored further.  After all, aside from everything else it’s not actually true.

Read it.

‘Zenergy’ eco-home gets award from local senator anyway.

Of course. Facts can’t be allowed to stand in the way of The Narrative.

Read it.

And why ought it? The Bible isn’t intended as history but as moral instruction. One could as pointlessly worry about the ‘discrepancies’ in Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Aesop’s Fables. Either you get the point or you don’t — and, sadly, the Lame Stream Media typically don’t.

Read it.

The Greenpeace noise machine managed to persuade the Guardian to publish a “shocking” article detailing the amazing fact that donors tend to support groups that advocate points of view with which they generally agree.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Read it.

A White House staffer told the American Spectator that “These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general. Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative Web sites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It’s BS.” (We called the White House for elaboration but got no response.)

Oh, I think that the White House and Democrats are doing a fine job of embarrassing themselves all on their own.

In other words, CEOs who must abide by U.S. accounting laws under pain of SEC sanction, and who warned about such writedowns for months, are merely trying to ruin President Obama’s moment of glory. Sure.

Read it.

Maureen Dowd, the Times’s op-ed columnist for angry, single, middle-aged, Upper West Side women who talk to their cats, ends her rant against the pope today by stomping her feet and hurling the ultimate zinger at the Vatican’s legal experts:

“Maybe they worked for Enron.”

Paul was just doing his job. ‘Tis the season for reconciliation, Maureen.

Programs! Get your programs here! You can’t tell who’s getting paid off by who without a program!

Read it.

‘It must be true! I read it on the internet!’

Read it.

Anybody who can’t get affirmative action points from the government. This includes Caucasians and Asians.

Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

A Crustian view of a recent book.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Fox News reported the allegations as facts, even though not a single video documenting the allegation supports them. It took the word of the Democratic congressmen at face value without noting the efforts Democratic partisans to brand opposition to Obamacare and the rest of the program of national socialism as racist. Given the partisan animus of those making the allegations and the lack of evidence supporting them, I think Fox News made a serious mistake in reporting the allegations as facts.

As they say, we report, you decide. When Fox News reported the allegations as facts over the weekend, it decided rather than reported.

Read it.

Virtually every aspect of Sikes’s story as told to reporters makes no sense. His claim that he’d tried to yank up the accelerator could be falsified, with his help, in half a minute. And now we even have an explanation for why he’d pull such a stunt, beyond the all-American desire to have 15 minutes of fame (recall the “Balloon Boy Hoax” from October) and the aching need to be perceived as a victim.

Jacob Sullum looks at healthy living and the scientific method.

The failure of the subsidies (an idea championed by anti-fat crusaders such as Kelly Brownell) is not surprising, since people do not buy Doritos and ice cream because they are cheaper than broccoli and brown rice. As for the success of the taxes, the enthusiasm of health nannies should be tempered by the fact that the experiment was highly artificial, since the subjects were not spending real money on real food.

Read it.

And about time, too. Bet they wish this could have worked 200 years ago.

Alvin Delisle is Mohawk. Pauline Labelle is not. They have spent a decade together, but are being forced to separate as their leaders have ordered all non-aboriginals off their lands in eastern Canada.

Cry me a river. They are not, of course, ‘forced to separate’; he could always move to wherever she’s going. Apparently his commitment is pretty shallow.

Read it.

Demonstrating how Hollywood writers aren’t reticent about inserting gratuitous political points into prime time dramas, on last Sunday night’s (February 21) episode of ABC’s Brothers and Sisters, “Nora Walker,” played by liberal actress Sally Field, walked into her kitchen during a kick-off party for her daughter’s Republican senatorial campaign, and complained to another daughter, a son and his husband: “I can’t believe the three of you are in here drinking while the GOP is out there denying global warming.”

Read it.

An Australian government programme that imposes restrictions on Aboriginies in an attempt to stamp out sexual abuse of children in remote outback towns has been branded racist and ineffective by the United Nations.

And, let’s face it, the U.N. knows from ineffective and racist.

Read it.

I’m thinking not.

Read it.

Well. Isn’t that special.

Read it.

Yeah, about the time I get my personal jet belt.

Read it.

Puts to rest any speculation that David Brooks is actually a conservative.

The Other McCain, of course, reacts appropriately.

NPR.

Your tax dollars paid for this. Aren’t you proud?

Read it.

Which is…?

Professor = uppity = black. Left wing, Socialist, palling around with terrorists = out-of-place black. Intellectual = frightening = especially frightening when black. True, most professors, intellectuals, and left wing Socialists are actually not black, nor are those categories seen as stereotypically black. But you say something bad about President Obama, of course that must mean you’re attacking his race. Because, you know, it’s not like conservatives have ever been known for criticizing white liberals. Why else would they pick on a liberal politician if not because of his race?

Read it.

Feel free to be depressed for, oh, about ten minutes. This is, after all, the most important thing we have to worry about today.

Read it.

An excellent we-mind-everybody-else’s-business-so-that-you-don’t-have-to article from The New Republic, the paradigmatic SWPL publication. Part of the “think globally, angst locally” movement.

Jane Brody, in the New York Times, gives a tongue-bath to Michael Pollan’s new book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. This is such a poster-child piece of New Age Journalism that it has to be read to be believed.

I find Pollan’s books entertaining, but Brody freely admits the characteristics (‘Mr. Pollan is not a biochemist or a nutritionist but rather a professor of science journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.’ and ‘…this little book, which is based on research but not annotated…’) that lead me to take his aphorisms with a grain of salt. (Oh, wait, no, salt is bad … unless it’s kosher sea salt gathered by happy tribesmen in underdeveloped nations.)

Brody also cements her status as a member of the Crust with such PC sentiments as ‘I will add a third reason: our economy cannot afford to continue to patch up the millions of people who each year develop a diet-related ailment, and our planetary resources simply cannot sustain our eating style and continue to support its ever-growing population.’ People who use phrases like ‘economy cannot afford’ ought to be sent to re-education camps until they quit thinking in absurd generalizations and better understand the nature of markets.

Brody is also a devout communicant of the Church of Gaia: ‘No natural food is simply a collection of nutrients, and a processed food stripped of its natural goodness to which nutrients are then added is no bargain for your body.’ You’d think that somebody with a degree in biochemistry would hesitate to use terms like ‘natural goodness’, but apparently a lifetime in journalism degrades neural pathways more than one might expect.

Pollan certainly understands his audience, and will probably make a ton of money on this book, as he has on his previous two. It’s amazing how many people keep writing for The Whole Earth Catalog thirty years after its demise.

Read it.

Well, maybe then people will stop whining about it.

Look, anybody who reads a newspaper knows that taking a boat within a thousand miles of the Somali coast is like putting cake out for the rats. This isn’t a hundred years ago, and if you get captured by thieving Muslims you are on your own, baby. These guys are probably too old for a Darwin Award but I’d still be happy to recommend them.

Read it.

Yeah, Mia Farrow is the first person I look to when I’m looking for advice on how to run the world better.

Jack Shafer is pretty dyspeptic these days. But here’s the fun part:

Haitian Nitpicking Bonus No. 1: Why the goddamn hell is Barack Obama writing the cover story for next week’s Newsweek (which, like Slate, is owned by the Washington Post Co.)? He doesn’t know anything about Haiti outside of what his aides may have told him. He won’t even write it! If the piece is worth publishing, Newsweek should give the byline to its true author.

This is news?

Read it.

Note how Barbara Strauch establishes her progressive bona fides in the first paragraph:

I LOVE reading history, and the shelves in my living room are lined with fat, fact-filled books. There’s “The Hemingses of Monticello,” about the family of Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress; there’s “House of Cards,” about the fall of Bear Stearns; there’s “Titan,” about John D. Rockefeller Sr.

How she resisted including Dreams From My Father in her list of ‘fat, fact-filled books’ is a puzzle. I love reading history, and the shelves of my living room are filled with books like The Art of Medieval Hunting by John Cummins, The History of Money by Jack Williamson, and John Adams by David McCullough — not the sort of shelf-liners that will get you a gig writing for the New York Times.

The problem is, as much as I’ve enjoyed these books, I don’t really remember reading any of them. Certainly I know the main points. But didn’t I, after underlining all those interesting parts, retain anything else? It’s maddening and, sorry to say, not all that unusual for a brain at middle age: I don’t just forget whole books, but movies I just saw, breakfasts I just ate, and the names, oh, the names are awful. Who are you?

A common problem among the Crust, for whom it is more vtal to display the right opinion-accessories than actually to have a thought. It’s a wonder they find their way to the office every day. Of course, they have people to do that for them.

Barbara Strauch is The Times’s health editor.

Of course. The health of The Times could certainly use some editing.

Read it.

Although why anybody would give a shit at this point is impossible to discern.

The Other McCain takes out the trash.

There are a number of people these days who are persistently characterized by dinosaur media hacks as ‘conservative’ despite a complete lack of evidence aside from the fact that they occasionally say a good word about what the dinosaur media hacks consider to be the ‘conservative position’ on a topic. David Brooks comes immediately to mind, as does Malcolm Gladwell and Andrew Sullivan, but certainly Friedersdorf fits in this bag. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me to find the New York Times someday tag unrepentant Trotskyite Christopher Hitchens as a ‘conservative’ because he correctly appreciates the threat that Islam poses to Western Civ and doesn’t hesitate to talk about it.

Read it.

Apparently the heart of American is Washington, D.C., and doesn’t bother with fact-checking, attributing a quotation from Bolingbroke’s ‘The Idea of a Patriot King’ to Jefferson.

Bolingbroke was about as far from Jefferson, politically and philosophically as it’s possible to get without being Hobbes.

(And what part of America does that make California?)

Read it.

Rachel Maddow recently indulged in a strange episode of media bullying, using a half a dozen disreputable and dishonest techniques to smear an obscure writer and psychotherapist, Richard Cohen, whose business it is to help homosexuals who wish to live heterosexual lives to do so.

Therapists such as Mr. Cohen are an object of special hatred for organized homosexuality, and that lobby probably has never had so prominent a voice as Miss Maddow’s. To be sure, Cohen is a distinctly unsympathetic figure. His psychotherapeutic work is pure New Age goo, but that is to be expected: Psychotherapy is pseudoscience. At its least destructive it amounts to idle chatter; at its worst it is a reality-displacing religion substitute, advancing beliefs that are every bit as fundamentalist and anti-rational as any desert jihadist’s, if not so violent.

Read it.

Perhaps it’s just that time of month.

Read it.

Apparently it could be caused by global warming. Whatever they teach in journalism school, blushing is apparently not included.

Read it.

A drone of the Crust looks down his nose at people who actually produce a useful product.

As you probably know, the California-based company Apple makes a portable communication device — a device that an acquaintance of mine whose first language is not English distinguishes as a “self” phone. Though proper nouns conventionally begin with a capital letter, Apple spells the device’s trademark with an initial lowercase i, followed by an uppercase P. Thus styled, the word has a hump in the middle. I could print it here to show you, but I refuse to allow my prose to be so disfigured.

Rather an elegant examplar of why Apple is making money, and the New York Times isn’t.

Read it.

Survey says: You don’t have to be Swedish to believe that.

Robert Wright, in the New York Times, seems to think that, as Mick Jagger was fond of singing, ‘Well, after all/it was you and me.’ This has been a beloved meme of the Blame America First crowd since the sixties. (Funny, you’d think that, if this country sucked as bad as all that, they’d go somewhere else. Sweden, say.)

One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them.

By this logic, leaving them alone would reduce terrorism. This is an idea so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it, to use Orwell’s phrase. What the left can’t see, because it would undercut their entire worldview, is that Islam is founded and predicated on terrorism against non-Muslims; it’s not just Methodism with prayer-rugs. The left cannot admit that it is possible for people to exist who don’t just want to get along. This is their blind-spot with respect to communism, and this is their blind-spot with respect to Islam. ‘None so blind as they who will not see.’

Read it. And watch the video.

People do strange things in service to their religion. Some of these things look very odd to outsiders. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Steve Sailer is never afraid to dig where others fear to tread.

I’ve pointed out before that New York’s liberal media elite don’t want the public to discuss IQ, but they almost all get their four-year-olds’ IQs tested so they can win admission to fashionable private preschools. Now the New York toddler IQ testing madness has spread to New York public schools.

The Other McCain is having fun.

Congratulations to this overnight Caucasian! He is now a man who can join the Klan. Send the word to Senator Bob Byrd.

Read it.

Faced with the obvious – that Hasan is a jihadist, an America-hating, Islamic murderer, the media still did their level best to paint him as the innocent victim. That wretched tactic having failed them, presumably because America is very quickly getting to the end of its patience with this shit, the media limbers up, pins its ankles behind its egos, and will be piling on so much evidence of Hasan’s guilt that the only natural reaction from apologists and pusillanimous hand jobbers the world over will be to blame, accuse, and denigrate the US Army for either being too stupid to detect it, or choosing not to stop it.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Dvorak looks like Al Franken without the hair. Just sayin’.

Computers give us highly realistic games that suck people into playing them for hours on end. And I’d rather not even want to get into the time-killer called Second Life. Here a person actually creates a whole second life in which he or she can waste countless hours within that structure and waste time as another person.

Well, that’s lost productivity – if your goal in life is to work 24/7. Lighten up, John.

As a technologist myself, I have obviously promoted smart devices and computers, but I do look around at my own increasing disorganization and remind myself that I originally got into computers to get more organized and more efficient, not less. Instead I got less organized and less efficient.

So your personality deficiencies define how bad things are? Get over yourself, John. Go play a video game or something.

Read it.

Probably to make sure the government isn’t screwing them out of royalties.

Read it.

The New York Times is shocked, shocked I tell you, that conservative journalists are learning all the tricks that ‘progressive’ journalists have been using for years.

‘Momeee! Johnny hit me back!’

Read it.

On the Left, there’s no room for 90% compliance.

Read it.

New York Times columnist David Brooks says that Republicans in America should look for inspiration to Conservatives in Britain, who back a 50% top tax rate at the national level. This is what passes for the right-of-center regular voice on the New York Times op-ed page.

I find it curious that the Crust doesn’t have Own Goal Specialists the way the ‘right’ has people like Brooks, Frum, and Friedersdorf. Perhaps that’s what being the Establishment is all about — don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Read it.

No, they’re not talking about the Congressional appropriations process. Being Slate, they’re talking about a medical device that poor people can’t afford unless they’re subsidized by taxpayers, so obviously this means that the system is broken. The complaint seems to be that because we have more MRIs per capita than any other country, we therefore suck. No, I don’t follow their line of thought, either.

Read it.

So after witnessing the waves of antipathy across the country toward President Obama’s policies, New York Times writer Charles Blow introduces his readers to the term, “aversive racism.” It’s a sinister kind of prejudice, Charles explains, that reveals itself in disagreements based on factors “other than race.”

A simpler definition of aversive racism?

If you say it’s not about race, then it’s really about race.